Hew Strachan

Professor Hew Francis Anthony Strachan, DL, FRSE is a Scottish military historian, well known for his work on the administration of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He was born Hew Francis Anthony Strachan on 1 September 1949 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Strachan was a merchant seaman 1968-1971 working a passage around the world on The Ben Line Steamers. In 1973, he worked as a member of a Sudan antiquities survey. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge with a B.A., 1971 and M.A. 1975.

Commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a history of the First World War to replace C.R.M.F Cruttwell's one-volume "A History of the Great War, 1914-1918", Strachan completed the first of three volumes, "" in 2001 to wide acclaim and is acknowledged as one of the world's authorities on the subject. Accompanying the print publication of his one volume survey "The First World War" (2004) was a multi-part documentary series for television entitled "The First World War", with some episodes being titled after the volumes in the written work. This set was also released on DVD by Image Entertainment.

A controversial claim made by Strachan is that the First World War was caused more by blunder and indecision than German aggression.

Professor Strachan is Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls, Oxford University. He was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow from 1992 to 2000.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Tweeddale in 2006.

He was married to Catherine Margaret Blackburn and they had two children. He then remarried to Pamela Symes and together they have a son.

Books

* "British Military Uniforms, 1768-1796" (Arms and Armour, 1975)
* "History of the Cambridge University Officers Training Corps" (1976) ISBN 0859360598
* "European Armies and the Conduct of War" (London, 1983) ISBN 0-415-07863-6
* "Wellington's Legacy: The Reform of the British Army 1830-54" (Manchester, 1984) ISBN 0-7190-0994-4
* "From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, Technology and the British Army" (Cambridge, 1985) ISBN 0-521-30439-3
* "The Politics of the British Army" (Oxford, 1997) ISBN 0-19-820670-4
* "The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War" (ed.) (Oxford, 1998) ISBN 0-19-820614-3
* "The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms" (Oxford, 2001) ISBN 0-19-926191-1 (first of an expected three volume history)
* "The First World War: A New Illustrated History" (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
* "The First World War" (Viking, 2004 ISBN 0-67-003295-6 (single volume survey of the war)
* "The First World War in Africa" (Oxford, 2004)
* 'German Strategy in the First World War' in Internationale Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, pages 127-144.
* "Clausewitz's On War: a Biography" (Atlantic Monthly Press 2007) ISBN 0-87-113956-1

References

* Contemporary Authors Online, 2007
* Debrett's People of Today, 2007

External links

* [http://www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/events/2005-04-21-hewStrachan.jsp Interview] on "The First World War" at the Pritzker Military Library